Modern Team site or Modern communication site for our HR site

[john john]

We have a new sharepoint online tenant. and inside the built-in root site collection (which is of type classic team site), we added some document libraries and news web parts. Now we want to create our HR department site. and one of the questions i have, if we should created this HR site as Modern Team site or as Modern communication site?

I read this link https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/planning-hub-sites which mentioned that team sites are used for collaboration (group of users exchange info), while communication sites are used when a limited number of users publish content for other users. Our HR will be more aligned to be a communication site, since we will have the HR manager and 2 HR employees publishing some travel guidelines, holidays, general HR documents, etc... to all the users (which will have read-only permission on these content). and later on we might define this site as a hub site and have more detailed site collections for the HR functionalities.

But one issue for using the communication site, is that it does not allow to have the links on the left side of the site (as in the classic and modern team sites). And our end users mentioned that they need a consistent navigation experience, where since our root site collection have a left side navigation links,then they want to have the same for all the site collections.. So i am not sure if i should use the modern team site instead of the communication site just because we want the HR site to have the navigation links on the left side instead on top (as in the communication site case)?

[#2]

It sounds like you would be best using a Communication site for HR in this case (although they are likely to also need a group connected (modern) Team site for their internal collaboration (and that could be connected to Microsoft Teams as well).

In terms of your root site collection, you would be able to create a Communication site at another URL (perhaps /sites/Intranet for example) - then use the new Site Swap command, to replace that classic root site with your Intranet Communication site.

(Site Swap will move your classic site to a definable URL for archive purposes - so no data would be lost)

[#3]

We were supposed to be getting a feature to change the quick launch to left top or none last year ignite they showed it but have not heard anything else about it.

What you can do if you want left nav and a stand alone site is create an old classic site that isn’t group connected. Then create a new modern page as the homage on that site. This way you get left nav and just a site similar to comm site with all the same functionality.

Problem is I got to go see how to create those old classic sites cause I’m not sure where to do that these days. :)

[#4]

Yeah, so when creating a site, just pick the Other option on the bottom, and pick Team site. This will create the classic Team site not connected to a 365 Group. Then you can go to site pages if it has a classic style homepage, and create a new "Home" page. Once created, go back to the site pages library and mark that page as the home page. This will give you a modern site with left nav not connected to a group, similar to a Comm site.